- Europe
- Médias
Freedom of Speech Under Threat in Europe : A Civilisational Crisis
In today’s European Union, disagreeing with the dominant narrative on immigration, sovereignty, or identity, can cost you your voice, your job, or your place in the public debate. Historian David Engels exposes the mechanisms of this creeping censorship and warns: the battle for free speech is now a battle for Europe’s soul.
According to a 2023 survey conducted in Germany, 44% of respondents believed one should be cautious when expressing political opinions, while only 40% felt they could speak freely—the lowest figure since 1990, when 78% still held that view. This survey speaks volumes about the state of affairs in the EU’s political and economic core. Similar findings appear in many other Western European countries.
The controversial topics are always the same: mass immigration, Islamisation, LGBTQ+ demands, or EU interference. Anyone who dares to question the narrative upheld by most political elites and public media is quickly discredited as far-right—with potentially dangerous consequences not only for the state of our democracies, but also of individual liberty rights, as recently underlined by J.D. Vance at the Munich security conference.
A Subtle but Real Repression
While tangible political reprisals remain far less severe than in countries like China or Russia, there has been a worrying uptick in recent years: social media account deletions, defamatory smears, job losses, bank account closures, financial sanctions, lease terminations, organisational bans, hate speech prosecutions, imprisonment—anyone with even slight exposure to right-wing circles can cite numerous examples. And during the COVID period, everyone could witness how far the current political system was willing to go to defend its choices…
European Values Turned Against Freedom
Although we cannot deny that similar cases have occurred in Poland under Kaczyński or in Hungary under Orbán, targeting the left, there remains a significant imbalance to the detriment of views labelled as “right-wing.”
Why? And how? The two questions are linked. Through a long march across institutions, media, education, and administration, the political left has successfully imposed its worldview.
As a result, broad concepts such as freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law, and justice are now interpreted through a left-leaning lens and presented as the only legitimate ones, disqualifying all others as “racist”, “nationalist”, “fundamentalist”, “reactionary”, or “patriarchal”.
Once ideologically redefined, these values are enforced through legal and judicial mechanisms, often to absurd extremes: human dignity is used to justify abortion, religious tolerance to justify Islamisation, freedom of speech to justify censorship laws, the right to asylum to justify mass immigration, democracy to exclude populist parties, environmental protection to dismantle industry, secularism to erase Christian traditions, equal opportunity to impose school indoctrination, and the fight against hate to dismantle the nation-state.
For over two decades, a complex web of institutions has been built to enforce this logic: NGOs, online censors, public bodies, and countless EU agencies—most recently the “European Board for Media Services”, all supposedly created to defend democracy, but in reality narrowing the scope of public debate to a single ideological framework.
Reforming institutions means nothing if minds remain colonised. Before building a nation, we must rebuild a people.
The Cultural Battle to Lead
How, then, do we resist this “soft” authoritarianism,and in the name of what ideals? Paradoxically, the first question is easier to answer than the second. For at least two generations, the political right has neglected the cultural dimension of power. Laws, except in extreme cases, merely ratify shifts in collective mentality.
Reforming institutions means nothing if minds remain colonised. Before building a nation, we must rebuild a people.
This is where patriotic forces should focus their energy, not on short-term electoral games, but on the deeper cultural reconquest.
But the second question, what ideals to defend, is more complex. Should European values be interpreted through a liberal or Christian lens? Should we view Europe as a sovereign project or a civilisation? Should the economy follow libertarian or social principles? The answers to these questions shape not only our cultural battle but also how we define and defend free speech.
Even those committed to respecting opposing views must face a deeper question: are there absolute values worth defending, even at the cost of excluding contrary ones? If one believes life begins at conception, that Europe is a Christian civilisation, that there are only two sexes, or that property rights are inviolable, can one justify funding NGOs or media outlets that argue the opposite?
One may (and should) tolerate disagreement, but after years of growing polarisation, is a return to the liberal status quo ante truly realistic?
At some point, we may need to stop mourning the lost golden age of 1970s–1980s liberalism, an era shaped by specific geopolitical and economic conditions that are gone for good. As the “radical centrism” of the baby boomer generation fades, will Islam, wokeism, and patriotism, the three major forces in play, ever coexist peacefully without first experiencing societal collapse that exposes all illusions?
For now, the signs all point to growing division. And if the trend continues, tomorrow’s European conflicts will centre on far deeper fractures than the current debate over freedom of speech.
